The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  The girl started fading.

  And he remembered. Gabriella. Igor Tesfaye’s girlfriend nearly spat the name out just before hurrying out of the restaurant. “Wait! Tell me what’s going on.”

  She shimmered like a mirage. “This isn’t the right time for the telling.”

  “What about Carla? Where is she?”

  “Just down the road.” Gabriella motioned with a barely visible hand. “Go spread your wings.”

  Two blinks later, she disappeared.

  * * *

  Brewster put about five miles’ distance between him and the station before the shock wore off. At that point, a dozen questions popped into his head, none very lucid and most along the lines of the one he finally shouted aloud. “What the hell is going on?”

  He reached down and pinched his leg, hard, but that didn’t wake him up. It didn’t bring him back home, either. He still sat behind the wheel of a car that had no business being in Upstate New York let alone a year earlier than the night he’d fallen asleep. He tried to open his eyes wider. Nothing changed.

  Clearly, he’d be stuck in this hiding-from-the-butterflies scene for however long he was meant to stay. He almost followed the urge to turn around and head toward something he’d be sure to enjoy—the snow squall still looming in the near distance—but Gabriella said he’d find Carla down the road, and rebellion wouldn’t get him there.

  The squall had been creeping after him ever since he left the station. He glanced in his rearview mirror at an apple grove he’d passed a few minutes earlier. Shadowy curtains hung like cobwebs from the threatening sky and swallowed the trees as he watched. Up ahead, enough sunlight still peeked out of broken clouds to paint a field of pumpkins a bright shade of orange while greens, golds, reds, and yellows poured out of nature’s palette to color the autumn leaves blowing onto the empty road.

  The juxtaposition of images seemed far too striking to be part of a dream.

  A squirrel burst out of a clump of bushes and raced across the pavement. The critter looked up at the car, did a quick three-sixty, and hurried away, but a beat too late. Brewster swerved to avoid it. His passenger-side wheels hit the shoulder, and the rougher surface vibrated through the shock absorbers, jostling him and again bringing the dream idea into question.

  Not only that, he’d experienced icy-cold weather in the lot. A sensation that sharp sure wasn’t coming out of his pillow.

  He caught a whiff of skunk. He kept his eyes on the road and groped his hand across the dashboard to find the air circulator button. Dreaming, huh? Not hardly. This was more along the lines of what Carla talked about the night they lay together, baring their souls. She said she’d been falling through wormholes from one reality to another. She thought her soul had lost connection with her body and had begun taking flight. She’d also been dragging the fear of insanity around with her like her own shadow, but thanks to this wraith or witch or angel or whatever Gabriella was, Brewster could now put that diagnosis to rest. After all, he’d just stumbled across the same kind of wormhole, and maybe not for the first time. Had he been dreaming in Latin or living in some Latin-speaking universe at night lately?

  The realization this might not have been his initial fall through the looking glass was a little more than he could handle while driving. He needed to chew on something else, too—the hint of manipulation prickling the back of his neck. He glanced again at the approaching snowstorm through his rearview mirror, then slowed his car, pulled to the shoulder and switched the ignition off.

  Dreams and reality. Dreams and manipulation. Kara Danahey had touched on both combinations during their lunch. Presuming dreams were real and he was being manipulated by someone scary strong, as she put it, he needed to reexamine what had been happening to him at bedtime lately.

  Carla’s disappearance hadn’t been the only bizarre event the evening they first met. His Virtus dreams had become sharper. The last two about Adala had been so vivid he could still tap into the memories as if they’d been real events. And labeling this little road trip a dream was definitely out of the question. An actual snow squall crept ever closer from behind, not some subconscious fantasy. The sudden chill in his car came from switching the ignition off, not from forgetting to pull the blankets up to his chin.

  The brain-teasing manipulations of time and space were like the squares of a cosmic Rubik’s Cube. He gave it a few simple twists in his mind and came up with a solution that seemed to match all the colors. He and Carla had been swept into a supernatural whirlwind, and whatever barriers separated one dimension from another had been flattened by the relentless storm. The two of them blew from here to there like the spits of snow now blasting past his car, landing for a moment in one place only to lift and move on to another. Somehow—and here was the weirdest aspect of the whole mess—he and Carla had been falling out of their dreams and into the waking world with their trappings in tow—clothing, a placeholder card, a coin with dreams spelled in Latin, and, incredibly, an entire automobile.

  That last trapping was the real mind-bender. He hadn’t been in his car when he fell asleep. He’d been in bed with Carla. He remembered finding her in the street, bringing her inside, carrying her upstairs, and discovering the rapture of pure love. They’d whispered endearments back and forth until she dozed off.

  Or had he been the one to fall asleep? Yeah, he must have been. And when he did, his grip on the cosmic grid faltered. The maelstrom swept him away and dropped him into the wrong coordinates of a world with a broken calendar. This all might have been plausible in a universe frequented by wormholes, except he came fully equipped to hug the road—in a car, an actual automobile, a rental, by the looks of it, transportation to a gas station where he noticed the date. That sure smacked of manipulation, and he had a good idea who was behind it. Gabriella. She even spoke like a puppet master, didn’t she?

  “I can’t LET anyone see you flapping your wings here.”

  The sense of foreboding he’d suffered in the lot still clung to him like stale smoke. He couldn’t shake the notion Gabriella might be the villain in this fantastic story they’d fallen into. Yet this wizard-child behind the curtain might have been the one to bring Carla into his life. If so, he’d need to take the pitchfork out of her hands and paint a halo over her head.

  Was she good or evil? The imminent squall provided an encouraging clue. In a world shifting off its axis and twisted by a girl evidently able to spin time and place like a top, anything might have come raining down on Brewster’s shoulders, from tidal wave to nuclear cloud to volcanic ash to a trillion white butterflies fluttering their wings. But no. She brought snow.

  And he’d loved snow all his life.

  The squall overtook his car, sweeping all deductive reasoning aside and letting primal emotion hold sway. The same anticipation and wonder he’d been experiencing since childhood. He fixated on a nearby junkyard as the most extreme example of what he was about to witness. Every old, tired, flawed, rusting, tossed aside, and just plain ugly thing in that lot, everything from broken cars to worn-out mattresses to obsolete washing machines would soon be hidden beneath a sanctifying blanket of white.

  Snow had been casting a spell on him since the day in his childhood when a storm blew into Chicago and closed the schools for a week. That blizzard swept a roaring metropolis back in time to a quieter age. All modern modes of transportation stalled, leaving everyone to trudge from here to there on foot, dressed in heavy coats, bright scarves, and ski caps, gazing at the glittering wonderland and commenting how amazing it all was. Nature had granted furlough from schools, jobs, and all the other dreary obligations that can crush adults and children alike beneath the weight of relentless responsibility.

  He’d longed for a repeat of that magical blizzard through every subsequent winter. Sadly, perhaps because older eyes see less magic, he never enjoyed another storm quite like it. Still, each snowfall he witnessed always did bring a thrill.

  The squall bellowed with gusts so strong the weather-
stripping at his windows hummed in musical accompaniment to the swirling madness outside. He stared at the scene until there was little left to see. A nearby line of trees became chalky, then vanished altogether. Closer in, a speed limit sign faded away. Even his hood ornament blurred and disappeared behind the veil of white.

  Brewster had never seen one of these Lake Ontario squalls before, but the fury he witnessed was no great surprise. As a boy, he’d read every newspaper and magazine account of blizzards he could lay his hands on and learned that lake-effect storms tended to be the most impressive of the lot, particularly east of Lake Ontario where the rise of Tug Hill can strengthen a snowfall’s intensity. Four inches or more could accumulate in as little as a half hour, three feet in a day. That was no urban legend, but word didn’t get around much about the magnitude of these storms. South and east of Watertown, where the fiercest blizzards raged, the population was too scarce to capture the attention of network news—just a scattering of hamlets whose citizens took nature’s wild winter displays in stride.

  And whose citizens probably stayed off the roads when newspaper headlines screamed warnings about incoming storms. Citizens hiding from the butterflies. What better scene if the puppet master didn’t want him to be noticed?

  Snow flew at the car from all directions. The relentless, thick fog of giant flakes danced, tumbled, and skidded across the hood, refusing to cling except where his motionless wiper blades formed a windbreak and built two miniature drifts. Similar buildups whitened the weather-stripping of his side windows. He switched the ignition back on to warm the car. Good for the moment, but suppose he ran out of gas and the blizzard buried his car in a drift? He’d read accounts of people stuck in their cars for days. But just as he shivered from the realization a little too much snow might not be a good thing, the storm abated.

  Shadows of the tree line reappeared. Perhaps the squall had contracted into itself like a roiling sea, gathering for the next wave. Yet for now, a hint of sun peeked through the clouds off to the left, still shaded enough for him to stare right at it. He did for a long moment, then glanced in his rearview mirror and discovered an amazing sight.

  Someone had parked no more than sixty feet behind him—just a pitcher’s distance to home plate—and gotten out of their vehicle in the height of the storm. The heavy snow had apparently hidden the woman from view initially, but the squall had diminished enough to lift the curtain and reveal her, twirling beside her car with arms outstretched and head lifted. She danced like a ballerina. Or a pagan in the midst of a mating ritual. A mystic summoning spirits. The wind lifted her snow-covered hair and splayed it in all directions.

  She shadowed and disappeared behind one last heavy burst of snow before coming back clearer as the most beautiful sight he’d ever beheld.

  Carla.

  He scrambled out of his car, slipped on two inches of snow that had fallen in ten minutes flat, and nearly went sprawling. He steadied himself, took in the clean smell of winter, then exhaled a cloud of breath back into the brittle silence. His shoes got wet and his feet turned instantly cold. He rushed toward her, but she kept on circling as if in a trance. She looked gorgeous as ever, although dressed in an ordinary outfit for the first time since he’d met her—jeans and a peacoat, blasted white and showing only hints here and there of the darker colors beneath. The squall had transformed her into a snow angel.

  He took in her flushed cheeks, solemn eyes gazing upward, and the expression of rapture on her face and decided she qualified for automatic beatification. “Carla!”

  His voice must have broken the spell. The world’s widest smile spread from her lips to her eyes. “Brewster?”

  With heart thumping in his ears, he wrapped his arms around her, sending fluffy snow airborne from her coat and hair. As it settled, he could almost hear the chiming tinkle of fairy dust. “You must be freezing!” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m celebrating the first blizzard of the season.” Her soft, breathless voice warmed his ear.

  “You’re celebrating—”

  “Hold on.” She pushed back a step. “What are you doing here, Brewster?”

  “Dreaming?”

  She stared at him long and hard.

  He could have told her trying to figure things out would be fruitless.

  But eventually…first with a twitch of her lips, then a renewed smile, and finally a mistiness in her eyes, she came up with an answer. “Oh, you beautiful man! I’m not crazy after all, am I?”

  “Not unless we both are.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Refuge

  Thanks to toasty air bathing Brewster from the heating vents, the storm out the windows of Carla’s car transformed from a brutal endurance test to soft entertainment. Carla sat frosty-cheeked beside him, and together they watched windblown white sheets perform pirouettes across the hood. As he held one of her hands in his—a warm hand, despite her recent dance in the snow—he tried to trace his steps backward to figure out how he’d landed in such a wonderful place. The effort dizzied him as though he’d risen too suddenly from a prone position.

  “Do you know where we are?” Carla asked. A mind reader.

  “Upstate New York?”

  “Okay, when?”

  He hesitated. To answer would be to admit the universe had twisted into shapes he could never understand. “Yeah, I know that, too. Two thousand twelve.”

  “So what do you think of my time-travel delusion now?” She focused the soft, gray-green eyes of a kindred spirit on him.

  “I don’t know the definition of delusion anymore.”

  Carla leaned her head on his shoulder. “Do you know the definition of a dream? Mine have become so much sharper since we met. It’s like you flicked a switch in my mind. I remember every detail.”

  He closed his eyes and summoned the image of the red-bearded lieutenant riding beside him as they crossed the hot scrublands of Virtus on horseback. “These aren’t dreams at all, are they?”

  “No,” she whispered. “They’re real.”

  Real. Because somebody had flicked a switch in the universe, igniting a black light that made everything look different than it had before. “Carla, I met a creepy kid who implied she’s behind all of this. Have you dreamed about a Gabriella?”

  She tightened her hold on his hand. “She’s the girl who never ages.”

  He caught his breath. Gabriella hadn’t just gotten around, she’d left an impact. Igor Tesfaye dreamed about her, the trucker’s girlfriend feared her, and now Carla spoke of her in a reverential tone. “Can you elaborate?”

  “Pilgrims journey for hundreds of miles to hear Gabriella’s teachings. You don’t remember her from your visits to the other side?”

  “No.” But another image floated to the surface of his addled mind—a crude church huddling in the shadows of a town’s fortress walls. Something bad had happened to its builders. Luckily, his memories of Virtus were few and far. They often dragged sadness with them.

  But Carla’s mood was brighter. She looked up at him with a gleam in her eyes. “Listen to this. Two days ago, my mother mentioned something I didn’t remember. She and I met a girl named Gabriella when I was three. We met her in Syracuse, on this side. My mother says Gabriella came back to her later in a dream and left the Roman coin I gave you.”

  “When you were three?” Evidently, the wormholes spinning him and Carla out of their dreams had been building momentum for ages. He reached into his pocket and closed his hand around Carla’s coin. Somnium. Had Gabriella been stalking Carla, in and out of dreams, for almost thirty years? “I’m not ready to fix a halo over that girl’s ponytail quite yet.”

  “Saint or not, we should definitely drink a toast to her.” Carla opened the console between their seats.

  Somehow she’d managed to defy the laws of physics by cramming a small thermos into a space already overloaded with enough clutter to fill a woman’s purse and then some—lipstick, tissues, dental floss, sunglasses, first-aid kit
, needle and three spools of thread, a paperback, and a packet of unmentionable womanly stuff that had every chance of striking Brewster blind. He averted his eyes until she drew him in again by unscrewing the thermos and releasing a cloud of steam. The chocolaty scent summoned the image of roaring fires on cold winter days. She filled the cap to the brim, took a slow sip, and lifted her eyes heavenward.

  They passed the cup back and forth.

  The drink warmed his hands, the steam bathed his face, and the taste of chocolate and marshmallows sent him straight to paradise. He let Carla have the last of it. “I’d toast Gabriella with a little more gusto if she’d brought us together from the same page of the calendar. Why a year apart?”

  Carla polished off the drink, screwed the cap back onto the thermos, and stowed it away. When she turned to him again, she wasn’t smiling anymore. “I think she’s doing it to save my life.”

  “What?”

  “Hear me out.” She switched the wipers on. Crescents formed on the windshield with each swipe. The storm filled them in, and the blades repeated the process. Again. And again. An impasse between technology and nature. “I live in Sanctimonia over there, and you’re from?”

  “Virtus.”

  “Two nations perpetually at war. I need saving there, too, believe me, but we’re too far apart.” She turned to him. Her eyes had moistened. “We’re worlds apart here, too. You’re from 2013, and I’m from 2012. Why? Because I don’t think I’m still alive in your world.”

  Alive could have had a dozen possible meanings, but the tremble in Carla’s voice narrowed the options, sending a chill down Brewster’s spine. “What are you talking about? Sure, you—”

  She pressed a finger to his lips. “I don’t do well as a puppet on a string. Do you think I’d just sit on the sidelines for an entire year, waiting for Gabriella or wormholes or whatever to drop me into your neighborhood the few times they got the whim? No.” She motioned to a travel bag in the backseat. “I’d pack my things and come calling on the Brewster DeLay who lives in 2012, my year. But if I did, the Brewster who lives in 2013, your year, would have known me when I wandered into his neighborhood during that thunderstorm.”